It has emerged that Chinese contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn, famous for suicidal employees, authoritarian control over its workers, and contracts for Apple, last year handed three employees over to police for leaking the design of the iPad 2.
The news, only now emerging from China, comes a month after Chinese police …

They were already getting a living wage

Not great by our standards, but better than the areas that they come from and enough to afford luxuries like mobile phones and eating out at restaurants. The workers in question will have been at the upper end of the scale in order to have been involved in prototype construction, so they will have been on rather more than basic wages.

Prison in China is rather worse than the cosseted life that US/European lead, they'll much prefer to be working at Foxconn believe me.

Hmm

What?

Foxconn make stuff for loads of people. Just because the arrest in question was about the iPad 2 (for which there is a lot of money to be made in accessories) doesn't mean this has anything to do with Apple. They've been quite tough on Foxconn and other contractors and have even terminated contracts due to health and safety violations.

Here's a list of Foxconn customers, I'm willing to bet that you have some of their products:

Foxconn & not really

There's really two stories. 1) Foxconn 2) PRC managers and workers and union etc. Foxconn follows "when in Rome do as the Romans do", so a lot of the ongoings are PRC management - culture. Very big factories like Foxconn's ops are very hard to create in outside-culture patterns. Toyota successfully instills it's kata in PRC, with a swack of provisos because the prevailing culture still tends to bonk things.

Foxconn is Taiwanese. Check the local Taiwanese businessman's school in that area of China. You'll find PRC schooling problems in a school offering a Taiwanese program. Same pattern of problems - and problems to do with the kids. A very sensitive area. When the sky fell and all the money first dribbled away, the PRC Chinese boss of the Dongguan Taiwanese businessman's school decided to cut back. His budget and available money was actually unchanged, he just followed the local crash norms. So he skewered the living arrangements for the higher-paid-than-everybody-else white-face english-second-language teachers, and they left. Bonkering the school program and saving money that the businessmen employing him were happy to spend on their kids. That's the place where Foxconn operates.